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00:00:37 And you remember much of your schooling either in the Tscherningasse or in the Sperlgymnasium?

00:00:43 Well, no. What you call Tscherningasse, which probably only you and I know, which was a grammar school,

00:00:49 what you probably, if you remember that as well, then I'll be flabbergasted.

00:00:53 It was not a grammar school. It was a school from six to ten.

00:00:57 Yeah. Well, let's forget a grammar school. I mean, it's equivalent to an American grammar school,

00:01:01 the first four grades from six to ten.

00:01:04 Elementary school.

00:01:05 Yes. But what you forget about this, I nearly forgot, there are two adjacent schools,

00:01:10 with a boys' school and a girls' school.

00:01:12 That's right.

00:01:13 And I went to the girls' school.

00:01:15 And I was one of, I think there were four boys and I don't know how many women,

00:01:20 I mean women, girls, hundreds of them, and for some reason the girls' school was four,

00:01:24 and they put the four of us in there.

00:01:26 And this, you know, a Freudian analyst would probably say that stuck with me ever since.

00:01:32 But that's one of the recollections that I have.

00:01:36 And I wasn't fazed at all by the idea of just being in class,

00:01:41 surrounded really centrally only by girls.

00:01:44 So I do remember that. I remember exactly where it was located.

00:01:47 No, I remember playing football with you in the Prater.

00:01:50 Right.

00:01:51 I don't remember being in class with you, but I remember distinctly playing football together.

00:01:56 We probably were both chased together by the police.

00:01:59 Many times.

00:02:00 For trespassing.

00:02:01 Sure.

00:02:02 It doesn't sound as if there was much science in that mixture.

00:02:05 There was absolutely no science.

00:02:07 I mean, we really were taught no science in the first four years in what would be grade school.

00:02:14 And essentially none during the next year and a half that I was still there.

00:02:19 There was one mixed class, some chemistry, some physics, very little.

00:02:23 I remember very little of that.

00:02:25 But no, science was not important at that stage.

00:02:31 But that's probably good from my standpoint,

00:02:34 because I think you got a cultural imprinting in terms of reading, in terms of literature,

00:02:41 and probably, I would say, also exposure to art,

00:02:44 in that going to museums, for instance, was just so completely accepted that you would do it on your own,

00:02:51 and Vienna was a good place to do that.

00:02:53 It's very obvious you've never lost your interest in art and wider cultural concerns,

00:03:00 but where did you gain your interest in science?

00:03:03 When did that come into the picture?

00:03:05 My interest in chemistry and science was really very simple.

00:03:11 Both my parents were physicians, and it was simply assumed,

00:03:14 I assumed, my parents probably assumed, that I would become a physician.

00:03:17 So in due time, this was going to be when I really entered university,

00:03:22 I would study a pre-medical curriculum, and that's really how it started.

00:03:27 I really had no particular interest in the basic sciences themselves,

00:03:31 neither chemistry nor biology, and that really only came when I took them,

00:03:35 and took them really after high school.

00:03:37 I never graduated from high school.

00:03:39 I sort of lost the last two years of high school, so I jumped suddenly to chemistry,

00:03:44 and that was really the first pre-medical course that I had to take before even biology,

00:03:49 and I really liked it.

00:03:51 And within the next couple of years, the liking became more that of, for the science itself,

00:03:57 rather than just its application to medicine,

00:04:00 and also I think it was so expensive getting into medical school,

00:04:04 I didn't have any money at that time.

00:04:06 You're talking now within your American life.

00:04:09 Yeah. You know, I jumped back and forth all the time,

00:04:12 but I was less than 16 when I came here, so that was all, yeah.

00:04:17 You left the Reorganism in July of 1938.

00:04:22 Yeah, June or July, right, some of 1938, yeah.

00:04:26 And then went to Bulgaria that same summer?

00:04:31 Yeah, no, directly to Bulgaria.

00:04:33 And you had spent your summers there. Your school always ended in July,

00:04:36 and then you spent the end of July, August, some of September in Bulgaria,

00:04:40 and then came back to Vienna.

00:04:42 Always on the Orient Express, yes.

00:04:45 How did life compare in Bulgaria with life in Vienna?

00:04:49 My father's family was fairly large.

00:04:51 He only had four brothers and a sister, and they were all like children,

00:04:54 so I think that was, I was otherwise an only child,

00:04:57 so I think maybe moving into that extended family every summer when I went there,

00:05:02 I think probably made a lot of difference.

00:05:05 A lot of outdoor stuff.

00:05:06 Sofia was fairly 600 or 700 feet.

00:05:10 There are mountains right around it.

00:05:11 You went every weekend hiking, skiing.

00:05:15 This is where I ended up with my stiff leg.

00:05:17 I really had my skiing accident the year before I left Bulgaria.

00:05:22 Yes, that was probably the most important.

00:05:25 I left Vienna when Hitler came to Vienna and went to Bulgaria.

00:05:29 I entered the American College, which was an extraordinary school in many respects.

00:05:34 It had really quite an impact.

00:05:36 Americans really don't realize the impact of these private institutions.

00:05:41 It was run by the Near East Foundation, which organized three schools,

00:05:45 American University in Beirut, Roberts College in Istanbul,

00:05:48 and the American College in Sofia.

00:05:50 Sofia doesn't exist anymore since the war.

00:05:53 It was the only place where English was taught.

00:05:56 The education was a very tough one, very good.

00:06:00 The teachers were mostly British and some Americans

00:06:03 and a few Bulgarians who spoke good English,

00:06:05 and everything was in English except for mathematics

00:06:08 and Bulgarian history and literature.

00:06:10 So in a year and a half, I learned a lot of English,

00:06:14 even though I never lost this mixture of accents that I still have.

00:06:18 That, I think, helped coming here.

00:06:20 The fact that I ended up in Newark, New Jersey,

00:06:23 which is not really one of the great cities necessarily,

00:06:28 but it was an interesting place.

00:06:30 It was a very interesting introduction to what America could represent,

00:06:35 rather different from Manhattan.

00:06:37 If you read Philip Roth, for instance,

00:06:40 or read Portnoy's Complained or Zuckerman Lost,

00:06:44 which is a fabulous book,

00:06:46 then it's all about Newark, New Jersey.

00:06:48 It's about the Newark that I really knew,

00:06:50 even though I only lived there for a year,

00:06:52 and I still remember that very well.

00:06:54 Did you and your mother at that stage

00:06:57 have any plans or expectations as to where you were heading,

00:07:05 or were you really just being driven along by the current of events?

00:07:10 Well, yes, by the current of events,

00:07:12 but we didn't live together

00:07:14 because my mother, who was a physician, came here

00:07:17 but couldn't practice medicine because you had to get a license

00:07:20 for a woman in her 50s to basically go back to medical school

00:07:25 was really more or less out of the question.

00:07:27 So she worked as an assistant to a physician in upstate New York,

00:07:30 and I went to school in a junior college in Newark,

00:07:33 Newark Junior College, which doesn't exist anymore.

00:07:35 So we didn't live together,

00:07:37 except again on vacation when I came to visit her.

00:07:39 I then went for one semester to a school in the Bible Belt

00:07:43 in northwestern Missouri, a Presbyterian school,

00:07:46 which again, one of the typical small midwestern colleges,

00:07:49 Tokyo College, that no one ever heard of

00:07:51 except Wallace Carruthers, the discoverer of nylon,

00:07:54 graduated from there, probably the only chemist who graduated from there.

00:07:57 And then I went to Kenyon College, which had 300 students at that time,

00:08:00 the only men, had a chemistry department of two

00:08:03 and an English department of ten.

00:08:05 This is when John Crowe Ransom, for instance, a great critic, was there.

00:08:10 The Kenyon Review was published at that time,

00:08:12 and I think that had, again, a real literary imprinting effect on me.

00:08:16 And yet these two chemistry teachers that I had,

00:08:18 one an organic chemist, one a physical chemist, were outstanding.

00:08:21 It was during the war, the classes were as small as they would have been

00:08:24 in a school of 300, I remember,

00:08:26 and the advanced organic chemistry were four students,

00:08:29 the physical chemistry took, I think, about two students,

00:08:31 and yet I did senior research.

00:08:33 Well, there you had this real private tutelage

00:08:35 with a very good teacher who still did some research,

00:08:39 and that, I think, really turned me on, on research.

00:08:41 At that stage, I was pretty certain that I really wanted to do research

00:08:45 and not just be a practicing physician, which basically my parents were.

00:08:50 Well, it's that conjunction of Kenyon College

00:08:52 with your getting such an exciting position at CBER that...

00:09:01 Yes, well, you see, of course, when I graduated from college,

00:09:06 I didn't think I could afford going to graduate school, so I had to work.

00:09:10 And I'd assumed I'd go to pharmaceutical companies,

00:09:13 in the manner in which I looked for a job as a nuisance,

00:09:15 because I had access to physician's offices where my mother worked,

00:09:19 and I looked at all the ads in medical journals,

00:09:21 and all the blotters and promotional stuff that they'd send out,

00:09:25 and there were the addresses of these companies,

00:09:27 and I wrote to every one of them.

00:09:29 There must have been maybe half a dozen or a dozen,

00:09:32 and the one that answered was CBER in New Jersey, Summit, New Jersey,

00:09:39 and went there, interviewed, and then decided I'd work there

00:09:45 and get my PhD at night and go to night school.

00:09:48 A fair number of people did.

00:09:50 Well, this was a major commute, about an hour commute

00:09:52 from Summit, New Jersey, to New York, which were the only two obvious places,

00:09:56 and I took some course in New York University at night,

00:09:59 in Brooklyn Parlor.

00:10:00 This is for one semester, really two semesters.

00:10:02 One semester at New York University, and that turned me off totally

00:10:05 to night school.

00:10:08 I took one or two courses at Brooklyn Parlor,

00:10:10 and then I said, it's out of the question.

00:10:12 This will take me forever to get a PhD,

00:10:14 and the people didn't even care very much.

00:10:16 But I had an extraordinary education at CBER,

00:10:19 because they treated me, even though I was hired as a junior chemist,

00:10:21 I was very lucky working with a man who was 20 or more years older than I,

00:10:25 who accepting me is equal.

00:10:27 We worked on a very exciting topic at that time.

00:10:29 This was the first antihistamines.

00:10:31 The concept of antihistamines, in fact, was not known.

00:10:34 The theoretical base was established by some French pharmacologists,

00:10:38 and in fact, the man won the Nobel Prize subsequently.

00:10:42 Really was Beauvais, but...

00:10:44 And then a Frenchman worked at CBER pharmacologist

00:10:48 who sort of brought the problem to CBER, and the two of us,

00:10:52 the senior chemist Charles Hutterer, who himself came from Vienna,

00:10:55 and I worked there together, and within this one year that I worked there,

00:10:59 discovered what was essentially the first antihistamine, pyribenzamine.

00:11:03 Actually, Benadryl and pyribenzamine were introduced at the same time in medicine.

00:11:06 And that was really extraordinary.

00:11:08 I was 18 and a half, and suddenly involved in the development of a drug

00:11:13 that was used by hundreds of thousands of people within a few years.

00:11:16 And so that was real education. It was research education at CBER.

00:11:21 Did Dr. Hutterer encourage you to get a PhD?

00:11:26 If he did, I don't remember. I don't think I needed an encouragement.

00:11:30 What year was it now, Dr. Geraci, when you were applying to Grand Group School?

00:11:35 1942.

00:11:38 So this was against...

00:11:39 And I entered in 1943.

00:11:41 A background of some disorganization in American educational life with World War II.

00:11:50 Yes. Of course, it was disorganization from which I benefited enormously,

00:11:54 because I had a knee injury from skiing, and I was not accepted for military service.

00:12:00 I was declared 4F, so I was able to go to school while my peers had to go to military service.

00:12:06 There were a number of accelerated programs, particularly at the undergraduate level.

00:12:10 They went through the summers, so I was able to basically finish college for a little bit over two years.

00:12:16 And even in graduate school, well, there weren't really accelerated courses,

00:12:21 but you could go, as you can even go now, in the summer.

00:12:25 So I really had a number of advantages.

00:12:27 Well, this was just after the first synthesis of the first steroid at Michigan,

00:12:32 and Wiles and Johnson had come to Madison.

00:12:36 What prompted your first interest in steroids?

00:12:40 Well, when I was at, as I mentioned, when I worked at CBER

00:12:43 for this one year in between after I graduated from college,

00:12:46 I worked on antihistamines and drugs.

00:12:49 Then this book, if anything ever came out that influenced me,

00:12:54 it wasn't a person in a way, but it was a book,

00:12:56 and that was Fieser's book called

00:12:59 Chemistry of Natural Products Related to Financierin,

00:13:01 which then subsequently was renamed to steroids.

00:13:06 And that was so well written, and it was so interesting.

00:13:09 I read it the way I'd read now a novel, really, almost.

00:13:12 And it was really turned on then by steroid chemistry

00:13:15 and thought I'd want to do that for graduate work.

00:13:18 And there were two people at Wisconsin, as you yourself mentioned,

00:13:20 Wiles and Johnson, who both had just started as assistant professors,

00:13:24 and both were interested in total synthesis.

00:13:28 Johnson, because of his work at Harvard, under Fieser,

00:13:31 with whom he got his PhD,

00:13:34 and Wiles, who had done the first total synthesis of equilinin

00:13:38 at Michigan under Bachman.

00:13:41 But I was not really interested in total synthesis.

00:13:43 I wanted to work more on partial synthesis.

00:13:46 And of the two, I think, if I remember,

00:13:49 Wiles was more receptive to this,

00:13:52 so maybe I'm just imagining this now.

00:13:55 And I don't really know why I picked Wiles,

00:13:57 because the interesting thing, in a way,

00:13:59 Johnson influenced me much more.

00:14:01 It was really wild.

00:14:03 Who was a very good teacher?

00:14:05 I probably picked the right person.

00:14:07 He had a small research group.

00:14:09 He spent a lot of time with you.

00:14:10 He had superb experimental technique.

00:14:12 And he really went to the trouble of actually exposing you to this.

00:14:15 And he was fairly demanding in terms of the manner

00:14:17 in which you should keep your notes,

00:14:19 in which you should really keep your experimental protocols.

00:14:22 And that really had an impact on me.

00:14:25 And he was a mild man.

00:14:27 He still is.

00:14:30 I don't know.

00:14:31 I was going to say, do I need a mild mentor?

00:14:34 Maybe I should have done it the other way around.

00:14:36 Because I remember coming in, the first thing I announced

00:14:38 was I plan to get my PhD in two years.

00:14:41 And he said, oh, really?

00:14:42 I mean, instead of saying, get lost, young man,

00:14:44 he said, oh, really?

00:14:45 And I said, well, in the catalog it says

00:14:47 you have to be here for nine semesters.

00:14:52 Well, you can go here in the summers.

00:14:54 So that's, if I go summers and the two in the regular year,

00:14:59 I can do that.

00:15:00 And he said, yeah, well, there are a few other things,

00:15:02 like getting a PhD thesis and passing exams.

00:15:05 And I really, maybe I was too cock sure of myself

00:15:10 experimentally, because I was so lucky during that one year

00:15:13 at CBER.

00:15:14 Actually, it turned out that I was lucky at Eastern Wisconsin.

00:15:17 But I nearly didn't make it.

00:15:19 And that's quite interesting.

00:15:21 My closest friend, Gilbert Stork, who

00:15:23 is one of the most distinguished synthetic organic chemists

00:15:25 in the world and now at Columbia, was my classmate.

00:15:29 And he worked for someone else.

00:15:31 But we did a lot together.

00:15:33 We learned a lot of chemistry from each other.

00:15:35 And he was kicked out of the Wisconsin chemistry department

00:15:38 for one semester and had to work as a fertilizer analyst

00:15:42 because he did something stupid in inorganic chemistry.

00:15:45 I forgot what it was.

00:15:46 And I flunked the inorganic qualifying examination.

00:15:49 And you have to pass four qualifying examinations.

00:15:52 And I flunked it.

00:15:53 And you have one additional try.

00:15:55 And if you don't make it a second time, out you went.

00:15:57 So I really then studied inorganic chemistry

00:16:01 and passed it the second time, not by the skin of my teeth.

00:16:06 I probably did reasonably well, although I don't think

00:16:09 I did fantastically well.

00:16:12 But you see, I nearly didn't make it.

00:16:14 And the same thing was true of Gilbert Stork.

00:16:16 But you did, in fact, make your PhD inside those two years.

00:16:22 Two and a half, yes.

00:16:24 So you were then very young by any American scale

00:16:31 of the age at which one gets one's PhD.

00:16:36 Actually, I got my PhD just before I became 22.

00:16:42 21 and a half, something like that.

00:16:44 Of course, you worked so very differently from the other graduate students

00:16:48 because you were married.

00:16:50 Most graduate students, surely then,

00:16:52 now work from 9 or 10 in the morning until midnight,

00:16:55 whereas you worked from 9 to 5 or 8 to 5,

00:16:59 but so intensely and so well organized that you could...

00:17:04 You are partly right.

00:17:06 You are right, I was married.

00:17:08 You are right, I didn't work at night.

00:17:10 You are right that I was a very well-organized person.

00:17:13 And I was well-organized also in laboratory work

00:17:16 and perhaps acquired that already from my year of industrial experience at SIBA.

00:17:21 But you're wrong if you're saying that most of the graduate students were not married.

00:17:25 I would say, the time that I was at Wisconsin,

00:17:27 I would say easily half the graduate students were married at that time.

00:17:33 But I guess they weren't interested in some of the other things I was interested in,

00:17:40 so I was not prepared to just sacrifice my entire life, my 24 hours to that.

00:17:47 Now, when you received your PhD,

00:17:50 was there any question of what you would be doing afterwards,

00:17:54 or was it pretty well decided you would go back to SIBA?

00:17:58 No, it was really decided I'd go back to SIBA

00:18:01 because SIBA actually were really quite generous to me

00:18:05 in the context of the years, the 1940s,

00:18:10 in that they actually paid me a slight supplementary stipend.

00:18:13 I think it was something like $1,000 a year during my graduate school,

00:18:18 with understanding, certainly not a requirement,

00:18:21 that I'd come back, or at least an incentive,

00:18:24 and I had no reason not to.

00:18:26 Jobs were really not all that easy to get,

00:18:28 so I had assumed that I would come back to SIBA the moment I had finished, and I did.

00:18:33 And you worked with Dr. Hutra again?

00:18:36 No, I then worked independently.

00:18:38 See, by that time I was a senior chemist.

00:18:41 And you worked on steroids?

00:18:43 Well, the chief reason for my coming, the chief project,

00:18:48 was not in the steroid field at all.

00:18:50 It was, again, in new medicinally active compounds

00:18:55 like antihistamines, antispasmodics.

00:18:57 That's what I was working on.

00:18:59 But I did have freedom to really also do some things of my own on the side,

00:19:04 and that's when I continued my steroid work,

00:19:07 the sort of thing that I started at Wisconsin.

00:19:11 And so I maintained a steroid interest in the laboratory for the next four years

00:19:16 and published pretty independently on that.

00:19:21 And the thing that really happened was in 1948,

00:19:24 the discovery of cortisone,

00:19:26 the biological clinical effects of cortisone,

00:19:29 which really sort of revolutionized not just steroid science

00:19:34 but medicine really altogether.

00:19:36 At that time, people thought this was God's gift to every athletic,

00:19:40 and there were these dramatic photographs of athletics suddenly starting to dance

00:19:45 and do all kinds of physical movements that were very painful before.

00:19:50 And I became very interested in working on cortisone,

00:19:53 which was a very hot chemical problem at that time

00:19:55 because the only available synthesis was serratin synthesis of bile acids,

00:19:59 which was exceedingly complicated and very expensive.

00:20:02 And a lot of people started working on this, and so did SIBA.

00:20:05 But there they did primarily work on it in Basel, in Switzerland,

00:20:10 and a couple of people in Summit.

00:20:13 But I wanted to work on it and was told that I could not

00:20:16 because other people were working on this.

00:20:19 And that was probably one of the reasons why I decided to leave SIBA,

00:20:23 although by no means the only one.

00:20:25 I really became very restless.

00:20:27 I wanted to, thinking of going into academic work,

00:20:31 which I really sort of assumed I would try and do all along,

00:20:34 but I didn't want to start right at the bottom.

00:20:37 I wanted to sort of establish a scientific reputation in industry

00:20:40 and then jump into perhaps a tenured position,

00:20:43 which was a naive thought at that time.

00:20:45 It's more common now.

00:20:47 And so I was getting restless.

00:20:50 I was looking around for...

00:20:52 And it was then that you were invited to come to Mexico.

00:20:55 Yes. One day I just got a phone call asking

00:20:58 whether I would be interested in working for Syntex,

00:21:01 a company whose name I had never heard.

00:21:04 In fact, no one really had heard of it

00:21:06 except a few people who really were in the inn

00:21:09 of the commercial aspect of the steroid business

00:21:12 and knew that this was a place that actually undersold

00:21:15 a number of the European powerhouses, including SIBA,

00:21:19 and the standard hormones like testosterone and progesterone.

00:21:23 I don't remember going to Mexico at that time.

00:21:26 I mean, even the tourists.

00:21:28 It was a very different proposition, but it is now.

00:21:30 It took about 12 hours to go there from New Jersey.

00:21:33 And I'd never been there. I didn't speak any Spanish.

00:21:35 And I thought it was madness to do...

00:21:37 No one really did science there.

00:21:39 And I remember telling it to Gilbert Stork at Harvard,

00:21:41 and he just laughed and telling it to...

00:21:44 Actually, maybe I didn't tell it to my professor

00:21:46 while I was at Wisconsin at that time

00:21:48 because at first I accepted the invitation

00:21:51 to just go to Mexico on an interview trip,

00:21:53 but I thought at least I'd see something about the country.

00:21:56 And I was overwhelmed by what it could be.

00:22:01 The person who met me was George Rosenkranz,

00:22:04 himself a Hungarian who'd gotten his PhD in Switzerland,

00:22:07 a very good chemist.

00:22:09 He was a technical director.

00:22:11 He offered me an opportunity which was...

00:22:13 The timing was exquisite because he said,

00:22:15 Look, we want to get into cortisone.

00:22:17 We want to work on a new synthesis of cortisone.

00:22:20 You'll get six, eight assistants to work with you in your lab,

00:22:24 which was many more I never had.

00:22:26 And I had a lot of different ideas.

00:22:27 I wanted to pursue them all.

00:22:29 And you can publish readily.

00:22:31 This was very important to me.

00:22:33 And Mexico City at that time was not what it is now.

00:22:36 It was really very beautiful,

00:22:38 a rather clean city in the context of the environment,

00:22:41 not this terribly polluted place.

00:22:43 And it was interesting to learn another language.

00:22:46 So I accepted that job.

00:22:48 And then I remember telling this to my former professor Wiles,

00:22:52 who thought I was stargazing mad.

00:22:55 Because no one... I mean, Mexico's...

00:22:57 There wasn't any chemistry being done there.

00:23:00 And that was probably the best decision that I've probably ever made.

00:23:04 Because not only did we do more chemistry in two years there

00:23:08 than I probably ever did in a limited period of time,

00:23:11 but these were very hot problems.

00:23:13 We basically won the cortisone race.

00:23:16 We were the first group to synthesize cortisone

00:23:18 from a plant raw material.

00:23:20 We published it first in literature.

00:23:22 It got the type of scientific visibility

00:23:24 that you would never have gotten

00:23:26 if, let's say, the work had been done at Harvard.

00:23:29 Not that it wouldn't have gotten a lot of visibility,

00:23:31 but to have seen it come from a place

00:23:33 where no one expected any chemistry

00:23:35 was really quite remarkable.

00:23:38 And when did your interest in contraception begin?

00:23:42 When did you realize that steroids

00:23:46 would become important in contraception?

00:23:49 Well, there was no...

00:23:51 You know, there was no specific day

00:23:53 where someone woke up and said,

00:23:55 Eureka!

00:23:57 Our interest in protestational compounds...

00:24:01 Remember, the oral contraceptive,

00:24:03 basically, the really active constituent, you might say,

00:24:06 is the protestational component of oral contraceptives.

00:24:10 And people had known...

00:24:12 In a way, an Austrian pharmacologist in 1920

00:24:16 had predicted that progesterone,

00:24:18 or the crop of luteum extract,

00:24:20 could be a contraceptive

00:24:22 because it inhibits ovulation.

00:24:24 Progesterone is not orally active,

00:24:26 and this is why, of course,

00:24:28 we didn't use a natural hormone.

00:24:30 We became very much interested

00:24:32 in making orally effective

00:24:34 protestational compounds at Syntax

00:24:37 for various reasons.

00:24:39 The key reason was, first of all,

00:24:41 progesterone was used in therapy.

00:24:43 Now, it was for menstrual disorders

00:24:45 or infertility reasons,

00:24:47 so an orally effective form would have been important.

00:24:50 Secondly, there were some real interests

00:24:52 which turned out to be misleading,

00:24:54 but nevertheless existed at that time,

00:24:56 that cervical cancer could be treated

00:24:58 through heavy doses of progesterone,

00:25:00 and having, again, a highly potent,

00:25:02 was very helpful,

00:25:04 and that's when my graduate school days

00:25:06 suddenly returned,

00:25:08 because in graduate school,

00:25:10 I had read some papers

00:25:12 by a man named Maximilian Ernstein,

00:25:14 who was a research professor

00:25:16 at Pennsylvania,

00:25:18 who had worked on compounds

00:25:20 related to profanthidine,

00:25:22 and it's too long a story.

00:25:24 Well, maybe I can show it to you for a moment

00:25:26 because it's not easy to just talk about it,

00:25:28 but here's a structure of progesterone,

00:25:31 and most people

00:25:35 had assumed that almost anything

00:25:37 you do to this molecule

00:25:39 would diminish biological activity.

00:25:42 Well, this is a shorthand

00:25:45 for methyl groups,

00:25:47 so I'll just put down Me over here.

00:25:49 Well, through a very complex series of reactions,

00:25:56 Ernstein had made this compound,

00:26:00 which, in the end,

00:26:02 turned out to be this.

00:26:06 Notice that there's a different stereochemistry here

00:26:09 from the one in the natural compound,

00:26:11 different stereochemistry here

00:26:13 from this one here,

00:26:18 but most importantly,

00:26:20 it lacked the angular methyl group.

00:26:22 There was a hydrogen here,

00:26:24 and these compounds are known as 19-nor steroids

00:26:28 because this is a 19-methyl group,

00:26:31 so 19-nor means one less,

00:26:33 but he had synthesized this compound,

00:26:35 and this compound turned out to be

00:26:38 a couple of times as active as progesterone

00:26:41 based on some preliminary tests in rabbits.

00:26:43 Now, this was quite extraordinary

00:26:45 because this was the first modification

00:26:48 of a progesterone molecule

00:26:51 which gave you a much more active compound,

00:26:53 and yet, not only did it lack angular methyl group here,

00:26:56 but it had the wrong stereochemistry at two centers,

00:26:59 which, in the case of progesterone,

00:27:01 if you just make this change in progesterone,

00:27:03 the compound is less active,

00:27:05 so we thought all this was associated with this here,

00:27:08 so we decided to make pure 19-nor progesterone,

00:27:11 in other words, progesterone based on this stereochemistry

00:27:14 and just lacking the methyl group,

00:27:17 and that was a problem that we solved

00:27:20 in perhaps half a year or less,

00:27:23 and that compound turned out to be

00:27:26 several times as active as progesterone.

00:27:29 It was the most potent protestational compound

00:27:32 that had ever been prepared at that time.

00:27:34 Then we went to the next jump

00:27:36 and wanted to make an orally active analog of this,

00:27:39 and we were able to do this by some modifications of C17,

00:27:44 and that was finished perhaps a year.

00:27:49 In fact, it was finished in the fall of 1951, around October,

00:27:54 which was around my 28th birthday,

00:27:59 and half a year later we already knew

00:28:03 that this was a powerful orally effective compound

00:28:08 as a progestational compound,

00:28:11 and at that time a group at Worcester,

00:28:16 at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology,

00:28:19 Pinkas and his group,

00:28:21 had become interested in orally effective,

00:28:25 in ovulation inhibitors, particularly orally effective ones.

00:28:28 They also tested this compound,

00:28:30 found it to be one of the most potent ones,

00:28:32 and that was sort of the beginning of this work.

00:28:35 By 1955 there had been already some advanced work done.

00:28:41 By 1957 it had already been approved by the FDA,

00:28:46 not as an oral contraceptive,

00:28:48 but for treatment of menstrual disorders,

00:28:52 so that if you get an idea of the speed

00:28:55 with which things happened at that time,

00:28:57 1951, first chemical synthesis, 1957, already FDA approval.

00:29:02 It was totally unheard of, of course, in this day and age.

00:29:05 What is amazing is, and that surprised me at that time,

00:29:09 is now, 30 years later, over 30 years later,

00:29:14 if you consider the day in which we synthesized it,

00:29:17 it still is the active ingredient

00:29:20 of perhaps half the oral contraceptives used in the world,

00:29:23 which is rare in drugs usually.

00:29:25 They usually die before then, and other things take their place.

00:29:29 This is a complicated reason why this did not happen here.

00:29:32 So you then spent these two wonderful years,

00:29:36 productive years at Syntax,

00:29:38 and then decided to go to Wayne.

00:29:41 Is there some parallel between Syntax and Wayne,

00:29:44 that is, that you created in each something out of nothing?

00:29:47 There was nothing at Syntax, really.

00:29:49 When you came there, there was very little at Wayne.

00:29:53 Well, I think the statement is partly correct.

00:29:56 That is, in each case, you can't really say there was nothing,

00:29:59 because in each case the opportunity was provided

00:30:05 for someone really willing to work hard and get going.

00:30:10 It was not a desert.

00:30:13 Each of them were places that were not really well-known

00:30:16 or totally unknown, and therefore to the extent

00:30:19 that you did really elegant new work,

00:30:21 it would be even more noticeable,

00:30:23 and that is part of an advantage.

00:30:25 But take, for instance, Wayne.

00:30:27 It was, first of all, the only place that offered me an academic job,

00:30:30 so you didn't have that many choices.

00:30:32 The interesting part is that Herb Brown,

00:30:35 Herbert Brown from Purdue, was in exactly the same situation.

00:30:38 When he looked for an academic job,

00:30:40 this was the only one he could get.

00:30:42 It was at Wayne.

00:30:43 He had the same lab that I did,

00:30:45 and he told me that he had to install the plumbing in the place.

00:30:48 Maybe this is why it leaked part of the time,

00:30:51 but Wayne did exactly for him what he really did for me.

00:30:54 It offered me the first really serious academic opportunity.

00:30:57 We were housed in a very old and terrible building,

00:31:00 but they were very generous to the extent that they could be generous,

00:31:03 which meant a stockroom.

00:31:04 It was a well-stocked stockroom.

00:31:06 It had good instrumentation.

00:31:07 It didn't charge anything for that,

00:31:09 which made a lot of difference.

00:31:11 And so I got really a lot of work done,

00:31:13 and it was new work.

00:31:14 It was different from what I did at Syntax.

00:31:18 There, I became interested in my first natural products research,

00:31:23 and that really became then the sort of,

00:31:27 you might say, the guiding aspect of my entire work.

00:31:33 I became interested in new physical methods,

00:31:37 started work on optical rotatory dispersion.

00:31:39 Now, all work that we did on methodology,

00:31:43 whether it's chiroptical methods, optical rotatory dispersion,

00:31:46 circular dichroism, mass spectrometry, things like this,

00:31:49 we always tried to illustrate it first by using steroids as models.

00:31:54 So that is where this recurring theme of steroid chemistry entered,

00:31:59 and these turned out to be ideal models.

00:32:01 There's no doubt in my mind that the progress that was made

00:32:04 in chiroptical methods would have taken much longer

00:32:07 if it weren't for the fact that we,

00:32:09 that our group was so familiar with steroid chemistry,

00:32:11 used them as models.

00:32:12 The same thing, I think, applied probably to mass spectrometry.

00:32:17 Were you happy at Wayne?

00:32:21 Well, you know, happy is, again, a complicated word.

00:32:25 I was not deliriously happy.

00:32:28 I was very ambitious.

00:32:30 I got a lot of work done.

00:32:33 I became itchy after a few years.

00:32:38 I had a great deal of trouble with my leg,

00:32:41 which had gotten worse and worse, and it was a very bad climate for it.

00:32:45 I was in a great deal of physical pain.

00:32:47 And then finally, after about five years,

00:32:50 by that time I was living on something like 24 aspirins a day,

00:32:53 which was just brutal.

00:32:55 I remember I was in my early 30s.

00:32:58 I then had another operation, another biopsy,

00:33:00 and at that time the doctor said,

00:33:02 you're either permanently in a brace or you have your leg fused.

00:33:06 And that was a major decision that really happened in Detroit,

00:33:09 and that really brought me back to Mexico.

00:33:12 It's very strange that these semi-disasters

00:33:15 really always turned out to be, in the end,

00:33:17 very interesting and good things for me

00:33:19 because the knee injury the first time around kept me out of the army.

00:33:22 The second time around I had to have this very serious operation,

00:33:25 and the Detroit orthopedic surgeon told me

00:33:28 one of the most famous surgeons for this type of operation lives in Mexico City.

00:33:32 And that was just at a time when Syntex wanted me to come back again

00:33:35 because it had just been acquired by American owners.

00:33:38 They really wanted to build up research,

00:33:40 but I had to come as vice president in charge of research.

00:33:44 So I combined the two things.

00:33:46 I said I would go on leave of absence from Wayne.

00:33:48 I would stay in Mexico City.

00:33:50 I'd keep my graduate students at Wayne.

00:33:52 I'd commute back and forth every eight weeks after I recovered from the operation.

00:33:56 Syntex would pay my horrendous long-distance telephone calls

00:33:59 because I'd speak to all my students a couple of times a week.

00:34:02 And in the meanwhile, Wayne would build a new building.

00:34:06 And about that time, then, Bill Johnson had been invited to Stanford

00:34:10 and invited you to come here.

00:34:12 Yeah, at the end of that, that is, after two years,

00:34:14 I was about to return to Wayne

00:34:17 and Bill Johnson actually approached me around that time

00:34:20 and said, would I think of coming to Wisconsin?

00:34:23 And that would have been a major, I think, step forward in terms of reputation.

00:34:28 Wisconsin certainly was a much more important department than Wayne.

00:34:31 But then he was approached to become chairman of the department here,

00:34:35 and he sort of made a condition to say, well, hire another professor

00:34:40 and suggested me, and that was when Thurman,

00:34:43 the legendary Fred Thurman was provost here,

00:34:46 who basically wanted to buy himself a new chemistry department.

00:34:49 So he started with the two of us,

00:34:52 and we had very serious requirements.

00:34:55 We needed a new building here.

00:34:56 I was not going to move again into an old building,

00:34:58 which is what Stanford had.

00:35:00 And I said, nothing doing,

00:35:02 just when Wayne was finally completing a new building for me.

00:35:05 And Stanford came across with a new building in a couple of months.

00:35:09 I mean, the money for it.

00:35:11 So I accepted a job at Stanford instead,

00:35:13 but stayed on leave of absence for another year

00:35:15 because I was not going to move here until that building was up.

00:35:18 And so then I commuted for that last year,

00:35:21 the third year that I was at Mexico,

00:35:23 between Mexico City and San Francisco.

00:35:27 And at that point you persuaded Syntex

00:35:30 to establish the Institute of Molecular Biology here at Stanford?

00:35:34 Yeah, I came the year after I came here

00:35:36 because I had a lot of my contacts and interests and friends

00:35:40 who lived in a particular medical school,

00:35:42 Dr. Lederberg, who is now president at Rockefeller University,

00:35:45 at that time was head of genetics.

00:35:47 He had won the Nobel Prize just a couple of years before then.

00:35:49 Arthur Kronberg had just won it at that time.

00:35:52 And I really felt that molecular biology was really the thing

00:35:56 that was going to flower.

00:35:58 This was not really my brainstorming.

00:36:00 I really absorbed it from this environment here at Stanford

00:36:02 and suggested to Syntex, who by that time were making more money,

00:36:06 that the time was to move out of the steroid field and do something else,

00:36:09 diversify in another area,

00:36:11 just that there had been a powerhouse in steroids,

00:36:13 let's be a powerhouse in this area of molecular biology,

00:36:16 and establish a research lab and do it here,

00:36:18 do it on the Stanford campus,

00:36:20 and with Lederberg, sort of scientific director,

00:36:23 and I would run it on the side.

00:36:25 And we did that, and it was called the Syntex Institute of Molecular Biology

00:36:28 on the Stanford Industrial Park,

00:36:30 and did this for about two or three years,

00:36:32 and then Syntex decided to really establish

00:36:35 a pharmaceutical company of its own in the United States,

00:36:38 and Syntex became the first biochemical, or even chemical,

00:36:42 activity in Stanford Industrial Park.

00:36:44 It's now probably the largest one.

00:36:46 And out of it came a number of other things.

00:36:49 Alex Zaffaroni then left Syntex in 1968.

00:36:53 He was president of Syntex Research,

00:36:55 and then I took his position and formed his own company,

00:36:58 ALSA, which became a very innovative pharmaceutical company.

00:37:03 Same year, we formed ZOICON,

00:37:05 a company working on a new approach to the insect control,

00:37:08 which I then headed.

00:37:10 We formed a joint venture between Syntex and Varian

00:37:12 called first CINVAR and then CIVAR, S-Y-V-A,

00:37:16 which became a very important, novel place in the diagnostic field.

00:37:21 So there are at least three or four companies

00:37:24 now in the Stanford Industrial Park

00:37:26 that came out of this initial move,

00:37:28 and probably, I don't know, must be at least by now,

00:37:30 4,000 or 5,000 people right here working this.

00:37:35 Why did you decide to sever your ties with Syntex and head ZOICON?

00:37:41 Would it not have made sense to work with both?

00:37:45 Well, of course, work with both.

00:37:47 I worked in three places.

00:37:49 By that time, I wasn't anymore a bigamist.

00:37:51 I was a polygamist.

00:37:53 At one time, I was chairman of CIVAR, this joint venture,

00:37:59 president and chairman of ZOICON,

00:38:01 president of Syntex Research,

00:38:03 and a professor at Stanford University,

00:38:05 which was probably the largest research group here at Stanford.

00:38:08 And so that was already an awful lot.

00:38:12 But then Syntex was growing very rapidly at that point.

00:38:15 By that time, it had already exceeded $100 million,

00:38:18 a company maybe even $200 million,

00:38:21 and it was getting very large.

00:38:23 It was becoming just a real administrative job,

00:38:25 way on the top with many different layers.

00:38:29 I really thought it might be interesting to start something new all over again.

00:38:33 You probably could do this just about once more in your life.

00:38:35 And ZOICON looked like it might be the sort of place.

00:38:38 So I suddenly, really sort of from one day to another,

00:38:41 decided I would quit Syntex and just focus on ZOICON.

00:38:46 And everyone was surprised, I guess even I was.

00:38:49 So I think to that extent, the decision was a good one.

00:38:53 And all the time, of course, you were a professor at Stanford.

00:38:56 You have the reputation as being one of the most prolific,

00:39:01 able publishers of papers.

00:39:05 You know, there are different philosophies about publications.

00:39:09 Yours has been that everything that is worth publishing should be published.

00:39:14 You know, there have been elitists in the country,

00:39:16 people like Bob Woodward,

00:39:18 who felt that only three or four or five percent of his most outstanding work

00:39:24 should be published, leaving, of course, a great many students

00:39:27 without any publications and very unhappy.

00:39:30 Could you comment on that?

00:39:32 You have probably...

00:39:34 Yeah, but I'll tell you, this has bred, of course, both more criticism

00:39:37 and, in some respects, comment, both pejorative comment

00:39:42 and complimentary comment than almost anything else involved.

00:39:46 And it's a dilemma.

00:39:52 I would say, from the purely personal standpoint of a scientist,

00:39:58 I think it would have been better...

00:40:02 I could have published one-tenth of what I published

00:40:05 and still not only have gotten the reputation that I have,

00:40:08 but perhaps have gotten more recognition by my organized peers,

00:40:14 meaning things like American Chemical Society and things like that.

00:40:17 But in so far as what it does to your students,

00:40:20 that's a very different proposition.

00:40:22 And I actually took my pedagogic role always very seriously.

00:40:25 I still do.

00:40:27 I really felt, after all, any professor, any academic chemist,

00:40:31 we know this perfectly well.

00:40:33 This is not what laymen really think of,

00:40:35 but we know it doesn't really work in a lab anymore.

00:40:38 I mean, it works with colleagues,

00:40:41 but these publications have anywhere from two to twenty names,

00:40:45 or more of them, which is not true of many other disciplines.

00:40:48 You have to be fair to these people.

00:40:50 They really are your peers.

00:40:52 They are not just your stooges or your pairs of hands.

00:40:54 If you do that, you have to really think of what it does to their scientific careers,

00:40:58 to their professional careers,

00:41:00 even to teach them how to write up their work suitable for publication

00:41:04 is an important pedagogic function.

00:41:07 I always took it seriously.

00:41:09 So I think it's, on balance,

00:41:12 I think it was probably societally better that I published that much.

00:41:17 Whether it was personally better, I'm not too sure about.

00:41:20 Let me just take you up on an aspect you referred to there

00:41:24 about your own working style.

00:41:26 You said you wrote a paper right through.

00:41:29 You've obviously come to have a life

00:41:32 in which you do an extraordinary range of things.

00:41:36 Do you tend to do a little bit of everything every day,

00:41:40 or do you move from area to area in longer blocks of time?

00:41:47 How do you organise all your activities?

00:41:50 I do it in shorter blocks of time and frequently in a day,

00:41:55 and I found that actually to be very stimulating.

00:41:58 This is why I always usually worked in a number of problems at the same time,

00:42:02 even scientific ones.

00:42:04 I think research is a very emotional environment.

00:42:07 You only have the absolutely depth of despair

00:42:12 or the pleasure sometimes, or almost sexual, if I want to do that.

00:42:17 But it goes up and down, and most of the time it's down

00:42:20 because most of research is really failures.

00:42:22 It's not really successes.

00:42:24 You've written a great deal, not only scientific work,

00:42:27 but fiction and poetry.

00:42:29 Does fiction and poetry come along in the evening when you're tired,

00:42:33 or does it come along any time?

00:42:36 I think this would be a very deplorable thing

00:42:39 if we only wrote poetry when we were tired,

00:42:42 and fiction would sort of put you to sleep.

00:42:45 This would be a new style of fiction, I guess, instead of sleeping pills.

00:42:48 No, first of all, the poetry writing and fiction

00:42:50 I've only really started in the last two, two and a half years,

00:42:54 so to that extent I've diminished a number of my industrial activities.

00:43:01 So that created a certain amount of lack of time.

00:43:04 But more importantly, I really discovered the poetry I wrote,

00:43:09 I've always read a lot of poetry, so it's not that it came out of the blue sky.

00:43:14 It was initially very bitter,

00:43:16 very bitter and partially confessional poetry.

00:43:22 It really dealt during some traumatic parts of my own personal life.

00:43:28 Fiction, I started to write on airplanes.

00:43:31 I do a lot of flying, particularly international flying.

00:43:34 You'd be five, ten, fifteen hours on a plane.

00:43:37 You would not be disturbed by anyone.

00:43:40 And I can write easily.

00:43:42 I mean, I can write quickly.

00:43:44 And I just recently had my first short story accepted,

00:43:47 and I tell you, I was more pleased about this

00:43:50 than about almost any scientific paper,

00:43:53 because I sort of think maybe I can lead just one more life,

00:43:56 which I've done before, which is sort of a literate life,

00:43:59 maybe just an illusion, maybe one can't do it anymore that late.

00:44:02 But I'd like to try.

00:44:04 The same thing with poetry.

00:44:06 I mean, I get all kinds of poems rejected by literary magazines,

00:44:09 but I've also started getting them accepted.

00:44:12 And it's very humbling to a scientist

00:44:15 who usually has no difficulty in getting new things published in scientific literature

00:44:19 to find these literary journals just, you know,

00:44:22 sometimes even just printed notes and say, basically politely,

00:44:25 get lost, don't bother us,

00:44:28 and then to finally find someone who does publish it,

00:44:31 and sometimes even a better one than the ones who rejected you.

00:44:35 And then, of course, you see that the subjective character

00:44:38 of value judgment in this case is so much more significant

00:44:42 than it is in science.

00:44:45 So I've decided to even write about this in a novel that I'm working on now.

00:44:50 Well, you've also been interested not just in writing and poetry,

00:44:54 but you've been very interested in art,

00:44:56 and two very different aspects of art,

00:44:58 pre-Columbian art and very modern art,

00:45:01 people like Paul Klee.

00:45:03 When did this come about, and how did it come about?

00:45:07 It was a mixture of various things.

00:45:10 I always used to go to museums.

00:45:12 I gradually started going to more contemporary ones,

00:45:15 particularly in this country and, you know, in some European travels.

00:45:20 The pre-Columbian art is rather obvious,

00:45:23 and really that's where my interest in primitive art started,

00:45:25 when I lived in Mexico.

00:45:27 But then moving to contemporary art is really the influence of primitive art

00:45:31 on people like Giacometti or Picasso or even Klee.

00:45:34 I mean, you see that in there.

00:45:36 The Aztec figures you see reproduced in Henry Moore.

00:45:40 I mean, this sort of thing was obvious to lots of people,

00:45:43 and it didn't escape me either.

00:45:45 So I became interested in that.

00:45:47 And then by the early 1960s,

00:45:49 I started to be sufficiently affluent

00:45:52 that I actually could afford to buy some art.

00:45:55 And I was a great believer in doing that rather than just saving money.

00:45:58 I was never a great saver of money.

00:46:01 And Paul Klee had become, from an intellectual standpoint,

00:46:05 he and Giacometti were probably the two artists that have impressed me most.

00:46:10 Giacometti, also because of the style in which he worked.

00:46:14 Klee, because of his...

00:46:16 I would say he's the most intellectual painter that I really know.

00:46:20 And yet the scale in which he works

00:46:22 is what some art critics used to call the master of the petit format.

00:46:27 If you become a collector of a certain artist,

00:46:30 you become, in a way, his friend,

00:46:33 his spy who is snooping around,

00:46:35 trying to interpret his private life,

00:46:37 trying to put, particularly, an artist's ideas into his work

00:46:40 that, in fact, he may not have thought of.

00:46:43 And even a hunter,

00:46:45 because when you're, of course, looking for certain things...

00:46:48 I was, for instance, very much interested in his graphic work,

00:46:51 which is very limited.

00:46:53 And so you're looking for a piece.

00:46:55 And to find that and see whether you can, in fact, acquire it,

00:47:00 there's an element of harmless hunting

00:47:03 with a touch of avariciousness,

00:47:05 which I then overcome by eventually deciding

00:47:08 that I'm giving it all away anyway,

00:47:10 so I can enjoy the pleasure of that acquisition activity

00:47:15 for a little while,

00:47:17 but then I will return the social benefit

00:47:19 by donating it anyway to a museum.

00:47:22 Now, over the years, of course,

00:47:24 you've had a very steady group of students,

00:47:27 18, 20, 22 students each year at Stanford.

00:47:31 Do you feel that your renaissance attitude to life

00:47:35 has influenced these students to look at more than just chemistry?

00:47:40 Offhand, I'm not quite sure.

00:47:43 I don't really think so.

00:47:45 You know, there's one thing that's interesting,

00:47:47 and it's, to me, a discouraging thing.

00:47:51 Chemists, as practitioners of a discipline,

00:47:58 are in many respects among the most delineated ones.

00:48:03 You know, they have very carefully defined walls.

00:48:06 This is chemistry.

00:48:07 Now, it doesn't mean that they don't, in fact,

00:48:09 impinge on biology and physics,

00:48:11 which would be the two neighbours on either side.

00:48:13 But even if you look at it in universities,

00:48:15 the least amount of interdisciplinary teaching by chemists,

00:48:19 I felt very strongly about.

00:48:20 This is why I'm teaching now in our human biology curriculum.

00:48:23 We have very little of this.

00:48:24 And you have it also really in, I think,

00:48:26 the demand of concentration is so enormous

00:48:29 that the really successful chemists

00:48:31 spend an extraordinary amount of time

00:48:34 on their waking hours, maybe even sleeping hours, on chemistry.

00:48:39 So they don't really permit themselves the luxury

00:48:41 of really doing enough outside of this,

00:48:44 particularly now of younger chemists, academic ones,

00:48:48 who are in a very brutal phase of trying to get tenure,

00:48:54 where unless you really work 60, 70 hours a week,

00:48:57 you can't make it.

00:48:59 Professionally, if you had to live your life over again,

00:49:02 are there substantial things you would do differently?

00:49:07 I would do some things differently, yes.

00:49:09 I think I was too much in a hurry.

00:49:12 The idea of trying to get out of school as quickly as possible,

00:49:19 trying to get through graduate school as quickly as possible,

00:49:22 not even bothering about post-doctorate work,

00:49:24 going immediately into something,

00:49:26 I think I should have done it with somewhat more leisure.

00:49:30 I think my private life, personal life,

00:49:34 I clearly paid a penalty in doing all the things I did.

00:49:38 You know, my door has never opened.

00:49:40 The counter just opened.

00:49:41 I sit there waiting for someone to pop in and talk to me for the next hour.

00:49:45 I'm not at all unapproachable.

00:49:47 But people either make an appointment or they knock on the door

00:49:50 if I'm doing something.

00:49:52 And then the most horrible thing,

00:49:54 someone says, I'd like to talk to you.

00:49:56 Could I come and see you tomorrow?

00:49:57 And my answer is, of course, but now tell me,

00:49:59 how much time do we need?

00:50:01 Well, you know, that is really a price you pay,

00:50:04 because it's really an insulting question.

00:50:06 I ask someone, how much time do you need?

00:50:08 And he probably thinks, you know,

00:50:09 what right has he got to sort of control my conversation ahead of time?

00:50:14 And I realize this.

00:50:15 By now I even apologize when I ask that question,

00:50:18 but I still ask it,

00:50:19 because I need to know whether I'm going to be spending

00:50:22 five minutes with a person or an hour,

00:50:24 and then I can tell him or her when I can, in fact, meet with them.

00:50:27 And that is a price that one should be aware of, of paying,

00:50:31 and it is not an insignificant one.

00:50:34 You know, I was even, and I'm not saying this braggingly,

00:50:37 I was really probably always an outsider.

00:50:40 This is true even in my, sort of,

00:50:43 within the American Chemical Society orbit and enterprise,

00:50:47 very much so, particularly academic outsider.

00:50:51 Most of the awards that I got were really not for my academic work.

00:50:57 They were really for my, quote, industrial one,

00:51:01 oral contraceptives, the Zoycon work.

00:51:07 It's the fact that someone lived in both worlds,

00:51:11 and that therefore the scientific work that I did in industry

00:51:14 was of a very high intellectual caliber,

00:51:17 a really quasi-academic one.

00:51:19 In fact, I sort of prided myself in that the research establishments

00:51:23 that I either created or I helped nourish,

00:51:27 whether it was a syntax at Zoycon,

00:51:30 and something that I did, whether it was in Africa,

00:51:33 in Brazil, in Mexico,

00:51:35 were always of a high academic level,

00:51:40 even if they were not in an academic setting.

00:51:43 And to have accomplished that, I think, is not easy,

00:51:46 and I'm very proud of that.

00:51:49 But it was primarily those things that people were surprised at,

00:51:53 and sort of, I think, neglected much more, in a way, the academic aspect.

00:51:58 Well, how many chemists in the world can truly say, as you can,

00:52:02 that you have changed the lifestyle of many millions of people?

00:52:07 Very few academics can. No academics really can say that.

00:52:10 Yeah, but I'll tell you, that's not necessarily something

00:52:13 that academics give you brownie points for.

00:52:15 In fact, some of them do exactly the opposite,

00:52:18 either because, well, you know,

00:52:21 in England, they would almost hold it against you.

00:52:24 At one time, they truly did,

00:52:26 and there was a gulf between academia and the outside world,

00:52:29 an even deeper one.

00:52:31 But even here, there's also an element of jealousy,

00:52:34 and I am fully aware of this, and I understand it.

00:52:37 It's psychologically quite interesting.

00:52:39 Dr. Dresley, there's been an enormous change

00:52:42 in the nature of organic chemistry

00:52:45 from the time when you started out

00:52:48 to the present day.

00:52:51 Can you say something about what you see today

00:52:54 as the areas of particular opportunity

00:52:57 and challenge in organic chemistry?

00:53:01 I think that, first of all, the change in organic chemistry

00:53:05 has become, one, tremendous utilization of physical methods,

00:53:10 both in terms of characterization,

00:53:13 basically black boxes, whether it's mass spectrometers,

00:53:16 NMR, or anything else, and separation methods,

00:53:19 the incredible advance in separation.

00:53:22 So that, in turn, has had an enormous impact in,

00:53:25 interestingly enough, these advances in science

00:53:28 have an enormous impact in tarnishing the reputation of chemistry

00:53:31 probably more than anything else.

00:53:33 When it comes to the actual discipline,

00:53:36 I think there is a certain malaise

00:53:39 in organic chemistry that one notices,

00:53:42 of people thinking this is not anymore

00:53:45 the really exciting discipline that it used to be,

00:53:48 and I think that may even in part be true

00:53:51 if you compare it to certain things,

00:53:54 that is, each science goes through extraordinary flowering periods.

00:53:57 This was true of physics in one regard.

00:54:00 In fact, biology came rather late.

00:54:03 It was sort of physics, chemistry, and then biology,

00:54:06 and biology, the explosion right now in biological information,

00:54:09 particularly at the molecular and cellular levels.

00:54:12 Some of the most exciting ones in that area, for instance,

00:54:15 are, of course, chemical in nature,

00:54:18 and chemistry has become the indispensable method.

00:54:21 So methodologically, it is a scenic one on.

00:54:24 It may not be that glamorous, therefore,

00:54:27 but I really believe that to be the case.

00:54:30 So it really doesn't make any difference

00:54:33 what a young person decides to focus on,

00:54:36 whether it's chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, biology,

00:54:39 but this leads me to the final comment that I want to make,

00:54:42 and that is it was bad enough

00:54:45 in the days when I went to graduate school,

00:54:48 let's say 10, 15 years after,

00:54:51 to just specialize in one thing

00:54:54 and do your thesis in only one topic,

00:54:57 and one narrow topic.

00:55:00 It is much worse, I think, to do it now

00:55:03 because I think that the name of the game,

00:55:06 there are very few problems that really can be solved,

00:55:09 significant ones, worldwide ones,

00:55:12 if only someone is competent in one discipline.

00:55:15 So either you have multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work

00:55:18 which has quite a lot of different people involved,

00:55:21 in which case you still have to at least partly

00:55:24 learn to speak the language of your closest neighbor,

00:55:27 if not the neighbor of one or two disciplines we move.

00:55:30 Following up a little bit on that,

00:55:33 what personal advice would you offer

00:55:36 to young people starting out careers

00:55:39 in chemical research today?

00:55:42 The world is obviously very different,

00:55:45 but your own career has taught you many things.

00:55:48 Yeah, but I'll tell you,

00:55:51 as I get older, I'm more and more resistant

00:55:54 to give people advice.

00:55:57 I think I'd rather answer questions

00:56:00 so if they ask me questions,

00:56:03 I'd say this and that.

00:56:06 I'd probably say, if I were in their shoes,

00:56:09 I might do this and that.

00:56:12 But you know, that's a luxury that is easy to do at my age

00:56:15 because I have accomplished certain things

00:56:18 that at one time were very important to me

00:56:21 and are now not that important.

00:56:24 I can pooh-pooh them.

00:56:27 A lot of people are in his or her twenties

00:56:30 and have the same expectations and priorities

00:56:33 that I had when I was their age

00:56:36 and cannot possibly have the perspective that you get

00:56:39 only after you've been around for quite a number of years.

00:56:42 In a way, I've been around for perhaps five or ten years

00:56:45 more than anyone else, only because I started

00:56:48 and moved the clock backwards, so to speak,

00:56:51 which, incidentally, is the name of a poem

00:56:54 and that's a very dangerous thing to indulge in

00:56:57 and people, of course, are very tempted to do that,

00:57:00 to give this sort of advice.

00:57:03 Because, for instance, if I tell someone,

00:57:06 yes, of course, go into academic research, academic career

00:57:09 and go to a place like Stanford or Harvard or Berkeley or Caltech,

00:57:12 well, you know, at the same time,

00:57:15 I sentence them to a very brutal existence

00:57:18 for at least six or eight years after they get their PhD,

00:57:21 an almost monastic one.

00:57:24 Well, you know, people do go into monasteries and it's useful to them,

00:57:27 but to just tell them, you know, get into the monastery,

00:57:30 just say that positively to people is a dangerous thing.

00:57:33 Some of them get very unhappy when they finally do enter this.

00:57:36 So I think one has to be very careful,

00:57:39 one has to really find out what is really part and parcel

00:57:42 of their personal psyche, and that's not easy to do for an outsider,

00:57:45 not even a teacher.

00:57:48 Professor, you've obviously, in your own career,

00:57:51 not only on occasion broken the rules,

00:57:54 but broken many records too,

00:57:57 and we thank you very much for sharing with us

00:58:00 some aspects of a fascinating life

00:58:03 inside and outside chemistry.

00:58:06 Thank you very much.